Authors: Rafael Yglesias
Margaret’s answer came with seventeen hours to spare, while he was climbing the stairs to their bedroom, returning with a cup of coffee bought at Dean & Deluca, a dose of caffeine he craved. “Puff,” she called at the sound of his tread, as she had since they moved in after Max’s birth. He didn’t answer right away, transfixed by the comfort of her welcome. “That you?” Her voice was hoarse from chemo tears and worried by his momentary silence. “I want to ask you something,” she said when he appeared. She was naked except for a black pair of panties, pushing her IV pole with hydration and her bag of steroids, her torso punctured and bejeweled with medical accesses and drains, her body emaciated, the skin frail and crinkled from fourteen months of chemo. She was struggling to put on a white T-shirt. Enrique helped her make the maneuvers around her IV chest port, removing the bags of liquids to push them through armholes ahead of her thin arms, until she had her wounds covered. During this dance, she said, “Would you do me a favor, Endy? Could you find out if I can be buried in Green-Wood?” She looked meek and girlish, as if this request were naughty.
“Sure…,” Enrique said. “Why wouldn’t it be possible?”
“It’s landmarked. I told you. Kathy was buried there, remember?”
“Yes, yes, I remember—” Enrique was quick to correct because, throughout their marriage, whenever she thought he had not listened to something she had told him, her feelings were so deeply wounded that a casual observer might assume he never paid attention to anything she said. This sensitivity was another legacy of her relationship with her mother. Dorothy often answered her own questions about Margaret’s life before her daughter could and, when finally corrected, equally often remembered her own answer and not Margaret’s. Margaret had married the right man to satisfy a worry of not being heard. Enrique had the ability to recall what people said almost word for word, a facility that he had once felt blessed to have. He had learned to his sorrow that his gift was not always welcomed by friends and family, and in his business dealings was not acknowledged to exist at all. “You said they were making spaces between the landmarked graves available. Isn’t that what Kathy’s—?”
“But that was two years ago. They may not be doing that anymore. They were running out of spaces and would soon close it to the public and that was almost two years ago. I even thought of buying one then, but—” She gestured vaguely at herself and her defeated body, and he understood that she was referring to a time when she was in remission, and when purchasing a plot would have seemed too pessimistic.
“I’ll find out.” He remembered vividly the bravery and sweetness in Margaret’s reaction to the funeral of Kathy, a young mother of two small children whom she had befriended in the advanced cancer support group. Margaret went to the burial with her group and without Enrique. She returned full of pity for Kathy’s children and gratitude that she had lived to see Greg and Max reach young adulthood. Tears welled above a serene smile. There was a brightness in her voice even as it broke. She was animated by grief and by love, by affection and by sorrow. She seemed a general
indeed, a commander of what terrifies and breaks the human heart. She took genuine pleasure in where Kathy had been buried, in Green-Wood, a nineteenth-century graveyard in Brooklyn whose hillocks, two-hundred-year-old maples, and weather-worn headstones were far more appealing than the practical sameness of the flat white rows of the Cohen dead in New Jersey. Green-Wood’s elegance and proximity to the Manhattan Margaret loved seemed to reconcile her to Kathy’s death and to death itself, as if there were a way to leave the earth and yet stay amid grace and beauty. Enrique understood why she wanted to be buried there.
He set her up in bed with the
Times
and a frozen orange bar to soothe her dry mouth, and she made a second decision. Enrique was thrilled to have her back in command of his daily errands. “Could you call Rabbi Jeff and ask him if he’ll do my service? And also ask him if we can use the Orensanz?” she said, referring to the nineteenth-century shul on the Lower East Side. “I don’t think temples are allowed to have funerals,” she added anxiously.
“Really?” Enrique asked. “Why?”
“Some crazy germ-phobic Jews probably thought the bodies would cause disease. And they were right. Maybe we could just have the service there. I’d love to have it in the crazy old temple, not in boring Riverside—and then you could just bury me separately, although I wish—” Tears appeared, at the thought of not being physically present at her own service, he presumed, a final agony for a middle child. How hard to miss a party, and in her honor to boot. “Puff!” she exclaimed. “Maybe it’s crazy, maybe you should just let them do it at their stupid temple,” she went on, frustrated at the possibility that the details would not be perfect.
“I’ll find out. I’ll deal with it,” he said in a rush to allay her worry and her struggle to sustain her taste and identity against her parents’ wishes right up to the moment of her death. Enrique was not proud of himself, that he hadn’t felt up to fighting this battle
for her on his own. But he knew Dorothy and Leonard would respect her desires, whereas they might suspect him—an irreligious half-Jew from another family—of having invented them. With Margaret alive to command him, and to verify that these were her orders, he had the authority to put them into action.
He hurried downstairs. He left a message on Rabbi Jeff’s voice mail and hunched over his laptop. He Googled Green-Wood and reached for the phone, sweat misting on his brow, bursting along his flanks. He wanted to succeed for her, to accomplish this task more than any she had ever asked of him, and he proceeded without reflecting that the gift he desperately hoped to provide was a grave.
C
ONSIDERING HOW HOT
with anxiety Enrique burned all day waiting for his date with Margaret, it’s a proof of the physical limits of emotion that he didn’t burst into flames and fly up, a charred husk, into the snow-threatening gray New York sky. A furnace of fear and desire propelled him back and forth across the shiny polyurethaned floor of his studio while a fashion debate raged. Should he wear his black Levi’s, his pale blue Levi’s, his dark blue Levi’s, or his one expensive item of clothing—beige Italian slacks tight to his boy-size twenty-four waist and flared at the bottoms? The tailoring of the Milan pants was dead-center seventies couture, which made sense since it was 1975. What didn’t make sense was to wear a thin cotton-linen blend on December 30. And there was the issue of the taut cut of the imported trousers across his groin, designed to show off a manly bulge. This exhibitionism
frightened him at both extremes of insecurity: that he had not enough of a bulge and that showing what he had was vulgar.
He would never have bought such pants if it weren’t for the influence of his bossy and sexually confident friend Sal. In most matters, and certainly in clothing, Enrique didn’t emulate Sal, but since his friend managed to get laid more frequently than he had in the past calendar year (not, in fact, a difficult achievement, one being a superior number in that regard), he had allowed Sal to cajole him into the purchase. All the gray afternoon in the halogen bright of his apartment, he dithered over the sparse selection of jeans and flamboyantly genital trousers, arriving at no satisfactory conclusion.
Except when it came to matters concerning Margaret—evidently—dithering was not characteristic of Enrique. Usually he made choices quickly and easily, buttressed by a reliable technique of research. Enrique relished knowledge and felt soothed by the security of acting out of the informed wisdom of men and women more brilliant and brave than he. But living with Sylvie for over three years had taught him little about what women looked for on a date with a man of twenty-one, nor had he thought to consult the vast numbers of women’s magazines offering insight on female critical faculties. He knew a lot about a woman’s sexual needs since Sylvie had insisted that he read the relevant chapter in
Our Bodies, Ourselves
and went on to be demanding, verbal, and specific as to oral clitoral stimulation and other advanced sexual intelligence about her likes and dislikes. Much of that could presumably be adapted to other women, but the question of what pants to wear on a first date that was really a third encounter, not to mention the fashion confusion caused by the fact that the date was taking place in casual Greenwich Village but on a Saturday night—where was the sacred text, the instruction manual, the manifesto to answer that conundrum?
Male advisers were in short supply. Bernard, his enemy as regarded Margaret anyway, always wore black jeans and a blue work shirt. His half brother, Leo, eight years his senior, had never gone more than two days without a girlfriend since the age of fifteen and would likely have laughed at him for worrying over his clothes. “If you’re worried about what you’re wearing, you’ve already lost,” he guessed Leo would say. That left Sal, fanatically loyal to the Italian pants. He insisted that, despite the winter’s chill, their flimsiness would lead, inevitably, to human warmth. “Mr. Ricky, with those long legs, you look so good in the Italians. She’ll tear them off you. You look like Mick Jagger in them, man.”
“I look like I’m on heroin?”
Sal insisted grimly, “Wear the Milan pants, Mr. Ricky. They’ll make her mouth water.”
To Enrique it seemed unlikely that Margaret would be impressed by anything a young man might put on, including clothing. He had found the nerve to ask for this date in the first place because she had launched, at the end of her Orphans’ Dinner, into a general denunciation of his sex.
Shortly after coffee, dessert, and cigarettes had been consumed, Enrique was about to skulk away for good. He was delayed by trying to think up polite words of farewell to say to Pam, the woman he believed Margaret had picked out for him, when he heard his hostess exclaim, “Men always say they’re going to call me and then they don’t. Obviously I’m hideously unattractive or terrifying in some way. That’s okay.” She laughed with delight. “But why bother to say you’re going to call if you’re not?”
Phil and Sam, confident and bombastic all evening, went mute at this challenge. They gaped at azure-eyed, freckled-cheeked Margaret as if she were a fire-breathing dragon.
“Right?” she asked Lily, who immediately answered in a cheerful, ringing voice, “Nobody even bothers to promise to call me.”
Margaret looked down the length of the table to Pam for her agreement, but Pam made no reply and appeared to be alarmed, as if suspecting a trap. Margaret redirected her sarcasm to the nonplussed Phil. “Who is asking you guys to call anyway? Why do you have to lie about it? Maybe I don’t want you to call!”
“Maybe that’s why we don’t call,” Phil said, snapping out of his momentary loss of debating finesse and using Margaret’s own testimony against her.
“Is that why
you
didn’t call?” she demanded.
A profound stillness followed this abrupt shift from the general deficiencies of males to Phil’s deficiency. Phil looked at Sam, saw no help there, and stammered, “Me? When?”
“Every time I’ve run into you since we graduated! At the first reunion, at Mary Wells’s party in Brooklyn, at the East Hampton beach party. ‘I’ll call you,’” Margaret imitated Phil’s declamatory style of speech, MacArthur declaring he will return. “Every single time. I never asked you. I never said anything about calling or getting together. You volunteer you’re going to call, and then you never call. Can you explain yourself, young man?”
Enrique ought to have felt solidarity with his sex, but he was gleeful at this turn in the conversation. He knew perfectly well why a man might make an insincere promise to call an available woman. He certainly planned to mumble something about hoping to see Pam again. To do less would be to invite a hurt or disappointed look and, especially for a Jewish son, said look from a female has a long string of bad memories attached. This was not hypocrisy. He would mean it at the time. Once free of the always compelling spell of a woman, he would decide not to telephone. But that behavior was typical of dull Pam and timid, not sexually predatory Enrique. With his trimmed beard and orator’s basso, Phil was killer enough to pursue women he didn’t really care for—and anyway Margaret was prime prey. And hadn’t Phil called?
Enrique was confused. They had been bumping hips and playing tug-of-war with the wine opener in Margaret’s tiny kitchen. Enrique felt sure Phil must have dialed Margaret’s number at least once.
Sam laughed at Phil’s discomfort. Margaret wheeled on him. “What about you? You also said you would call every time you ran into me—at Mindy’s party, at Joel’s—you said you would call and you didn’t. What happened? AT&T disconnect your phone?”
“I…uh…I…uh…I,” Sam stammered and then managed to chuckle at himself when the rest of the table erupted with laughter. He added in a grave tone, “I’ll call you and we’ll discuss it.”
Everyone roared again. Margaret smiled as if that had been her plan all along, to reenliven her dinner just as it seemed to be winding down. “No, no!” she protested and slung her right leg over the arm of her chair, exactly the posture she had adopted in Enrique’s apartment. “Don’t call! Write me a letter. That’s what’s wrong with men and women today. There’s no letter writing. We need to get back to the way it was in Jane Austen’s day.”
“But then the letters would cross or get lost and there’d be terrible confusion,” Lily protested.
“Well, it’s better than not getting phone calls!” Margaret argued. “Maybe it’s just Cornell men,” she said and looked across the table at Enrique. “Is that the problem?” she asked him. Was she warning him not to promise to call her friend Pam unless he meant to follow through? Hadn’t she made that situation more awkward by airing this complaint? He glanced at Pam and discovered that her somber face was lit up with delight at what Margaret had accomplished: embarrassing the young lions. Pam studied Enrique, black eyes glistening in anticipation of what he might say.
Phil declared aloud what Enrique was feeling: “Well, now
you’ve totally fucked with our heads. Are we supposed to call; or write; or say we’re not calling; or say we’re writing but not calling?”
Margaret, instead of answering right away, reached for the pack of cigarettes resting on the table. She had to stretch, which she accomplished with the limber seductiveness of a cat. She put the Camel Light between her lips and waited for Phil to strike a match for her, a tableau that reminded Enrique, to his dismay, of the choreography of chic lovers in 1930s films. With the release of a puff of smoke, she said. “You should say you’re
not
going to call”—she paused to increase the suspense—“and then you should call!”
That’s what Enrique did when he left, abandoning the field ahead of all the other males. He said, “Nice to meet you,” to Pam and made no other promise. He walked up to his cruelly generous hostess, who liked him enough for her friend but not enough for herself. She stood by the front door closet, offering Enrique his enormous Army coat while continuing to banter with the handsome Phil, who had trailed after her like a favorite dog on her leash. Enrique did not follow his friend Sal’s advice to kiss Margaret on the lips. He offered his hand. She took it with an air of surprise as if this were a ritual she hadn’t tried before. “I
won’t
call you,” he said. “But thank you for dinner. It was delicious.”
Lily sang out from behind him, “You still have to write a thank-you note.”
“No way,” Enrique said, turning to the cheerful Lily and offering his hand. “I’m a professional writer,” he said. “I don’t put finger to typewriter unless I get paid.” Lily ignored his hand, got up on tiptoe, and kissed his cheek while Margaret parried: “We gave you supper,” she said. “And you didn’t have to sing for it.”
Enrique left feeling ungracious and hopeless. But while he walked home in the cold—passing the bare trees of Ninth Street, the sealed garbage bags of the closed shops on University Place,
the strewn garbage of Eighth—he decided that, despite all the discouraging signs, he would call Margaret. Her bold complaints about men had given him a fatalistic hope that, although he was likely to fail, it was a failure not to be ashamed of. He had published two autobiographical novels, and exposed many embarrassing truths about himself. He had been derided in newspapers and magazines and by readers face-to-face. And since Margaret had mocked a man she obviously liked—the confident Phil—what further harm could it cause him to be ridiculed?
That doomed courage carried him through dialing the phone and asking her out. Now that the hour of their date approached, his nerves failed again. His fashion decision was decided by his mood over his prospect for success with Margaret. As it darkened, so did his pants. He chose the black Levi’s and a black turtleneck. He would have added a black coat, but he was stuck with the combat green of the Army Navy store.
Margaret buzzed his intercom at 7:43 to signal he should come downstairs as arranged and walk to the restaurant. He had been skeptical of this arrangement. She had declined his offer to pick her up as if that were silly. A bad romantic sign, he decided. It smacked of friendship, although geographically her plan made sense since they had agreed to eat at the Buffalo Roadhouse near Sheridan Square and Enrique’s building was on the way. She was supposed to have arrived thirteen minutes earlier. Enrique had read many a novel explaining that minor tardiness by a woman was to be expected; nevertheless, he had assumed by 7:35 that she was standing him up and so he experienced the buzzing, when it came, as a dramatic reversal of fortune.
He ran down the five flights. A sheen of sweat appeared on his brow in spite of the winter air. He greeted her awkwardly. He attempted to dodge the issue of whether to kiss her, even chastely on the cheek, by heading toward their destination. “Let’s move
quickly before Bernard sees us,” he said to cover the absence of a proper hello.
“We don’t want Bernard to see us?” Margaret asked, stepping lively beside him. Despite her ten-inch deficit in comparison to Enrique’s height, her gait more than outstripped his within a few paces. He found himself hurrying up to her bubble of a goose-down jacket, but not before noticing how skin-close her jeans fit over her appealing behind. That did nothing to slow down the pace of his heart, still pounding from his rapid descent. He said something he hadn’t planned to, and wouldn’t have said if he had thought about it, but the impulse to disclose everything about himself whether or not it might prove embarrassing was characteristic of him. “Bernard doesn’t approve of me dating you.” He glanced over and saw that her round blue eyes were more saucer-shaped than usual, and her lips were parted in amazement. “He refused to give me your phone number.” That brought her to a complete halt. They had reached the corner of Eighth and Sixth anyway, but the light was green. She made no move to cross.
“What!” she said with an emphasis that managed to be at once outraged and amused.
“He said you were out of my league.” Enrique broke into a grin, “Maybe that’s why more men don’t call you. Bernard won’t let them.”
Margaret protested. “You’re kidding! That’s hysterical.” She paused, seemed to review the information, and insisted, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope. He totally fucking refused. He was adamant. I had to look you up in the phone book. Thank God I knew where you lived or I wouldn’t have figured out which of the two dozen M. Cohens you are.” He gestured at the now red light. “Should we walk down another block and then over?” While they did, he continued on his reckless course of openness. “Obviously Bernard’s
got a thing for you and he’s scared to make a move. Maybe that’s what’s going on with all those guys you complain about. You intimidate them.”
“Me?” she asked with what sounded like genuine surprise.